Podcast: Mellanox Rolls Out SwitchX FDR InfiniBand with 40 GigE Built In

The new class of data centers requires lossless, high density, low power switching capabilities that removes bottlenecks, supports convergence and maximizes efficiency for the best return-on-investment,” said Eyal Waldman, chairman, president, and CEO of Mellanox Technologies. “SwitchX delivers on these requirements with best-in-class features and performance over both InfiniBand and Ethernet protocols for maximum flexibility. We are proud to provide the industry’s first 56Gb/s FDR InfiniBand and the highest density Ethernet switch, both in the same IC with SwitchX.”

Comments

I don’t care about IB. “Best in class Ethernet switch” ? What about LLDP, BGP, VRRP, IGMP? Sounds like a layer-2 switch with layer-3 services left as an exercise for the customer. At any rate, comparing L2 switching numbers with the competition out there than extends well beyond L2 is at best misleading.

The SwitchX IC among other things has a built-in L3 routing engine and a complex ACL policy engine that allows it to support the world’s highest switching capacity while supporting several L2 and L3 features including and not limited to LLDP, BGP, VRRP, IGMP. SwitchX provides the world’s best levels of density, power, latency and efficiency.

I believe the word “world” is regarding the hardware features and not the software. are you aware of competing switch ICs that match or beat M’s performance? Enterprises also don’t buy ICs…which this is…

L2 switching has been done by many before with similar latencies with much higher feature sizes. It turns out that enterprise as a target audience really cares about what you’d call “software” — Arista and BNT got this early on and they are making a killing.

From the peanut gallery, it will be interesting to see you push your chip to switch vendors only to turn around the week after and sell you own switches.

Funny, someone not caring about IB in the HPC market is like someone who doesn’t care about 4G in the cellular market. Sure, let’s just stick with rotary telephones and 300baud modems for our data delivery

Resource Links:

Latest Video

Industry Perspectives

In the second in this series of articles on ways to save energy in computing, Robert Roe from Scientific Computing World reports on how Europe is looking to both hardware and software solutions. [Read More...]